<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Pillars by Psythe</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24810697">Pillars</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Psythe/pseuds/Psythe'>Psythe</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Homestuck</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Body Horror, Bulges and Nooks (Homestuck), Casteism, Drug Abuse, Drug Use, Emotional Abuse, F/F, F/M, Helming, Helmstrolls, Marijuana, Multi, Not A Happy Ending, Pale Dubious Consent, Possessive Behavior, Psionic Sex, So much angst, Stockholm Syndrome, Suicidal Thoughts, but a triumphant one i think, canon character death mention, misogynist language (brief and insincerely meant but its there)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 01:55:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>16,874</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24810697</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Psythe/pseuds/Psythe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere before the end but after the beginning, the Handmaid of Lord English learns an unexpected lesson from the second, third, and fourth most important people in her life.</p><p>Somewhere before the greatest trial of her career, the Neophyte Redglare learns that there are more things in heaven and Alternia, and gets the tiniest glimpse of what maybe could have been.</p><p>Somewhere after surviving the end of his life, the Helmsman of the Battleship Condescension is reminded, by two people who are drenched in death, why he loved being alive.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>The Handmaid/The Psiioniic | The Helmsman/Neophyte Redglare, The Psiioniic | The Helmsman/Neophyte Redglare, past Psiionic/Dolorosa</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Homestuck Polyswap 2020 - Derse</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. a broken clock is right, twice a universe</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jokess/gifts">Jokess</a>.</li>



    </ul><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Mouse over Handmaid/Damara's Troll Japanese for translations.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>i float in a boat</em>
</p><p>
  <em>in a raging black ocean</em>
</p><p>
  <em>low in the water and nowhere to go.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>the tiniest lifeboat</em>
</p><p>
  <em>with people i know.</em>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
<span class="terezi"><span class="font-big">♎︎</span></span><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>You first meet her while you’re killing a city.</p><p>There’s no way to get out of it, obviously. Given the situation, in fact, you’re extremely here for it (in a relative kinda sense). The campaign’s stalled out, and extra strengths from the vanguard fleet are gonna be at <em>least</em> a perigee later than scheduled. The strike commander demands his results, and responsibility for those results is kicked back and forth down the chain of command, like an arena stickball, and eventually, after <em>entirely</em> too long, it comes across your desk.</p><p>You know better than most how long it takes to get these things through the stupid bureaucracy. But it’s still way disappointing, how hard you have to work to convince the strike commander to send you and Pyralspite down. You <em>get</em> that he’s under a lot of pressure. He has the fleet admiral breathing down his neck, too. And she has the royalty breathing down hers, you assume. </p><p>(It’s always a safe assumption. The weight of empire pushes down upon all. If you keep climbing that chain, you’ll find the Empress’s seven-inch glam heel pressing down on even the royals.)</p><p>But your request quite literally benefits everybody, each for a whole <em>assortment</em> of reasons. The strike group loses a lot less trolls and equipment, which is good for the kill ratios and thus for the commander’s report to the royalty. Said aforementioned commander gets a notch in his belt and gets to report back to the admiral with above-average results during a real gnarly phase of the campaign. The marines and planetary forces take <em>dramatically</em> fewer casualties as a result of not having to clear most of a densely concentrated urban area (something that appeals to you from both an efficiency standpoint and a more private trollistic one).</p><p>And you? You get the credit (at least as much as a neophyte teal can get credit for anything) of having done it. (In every sense of the phrase.)</p><p>You know why you’re doing it. It’s an action that accounts, on the balance sheets, for the lives of thousands of trolls, none of whom alone can do what you and Pyralspite can do. The death you deal out will pay, in kind, for all of their survival, at least for a few more nights. And if you don’t make a name for yourself doing things like this, you’ll never climb that chain fast enough. You only have a hundred-ish sweeps, on average, to do what you need to do. Not enough time, without doing something drastic, to shift foundations this old.</p><p>(Never enough time.)</p><p>So above the alien city, the lynchpin of the defensive line holding your planetary forces at bay, shielded from orbital strikes by the presence of the rich resource deposits it sits on, you fly, and you thank the Mother Grub for the small defect that took from you the normal use of your sniffnode. Otherwise, you’re sure you would have to smell the burning flesh of a few million aliens as they perish in the blaze lit by your lusus’s breath. (Instead you only smell their suffering - which is still completely grody on an existential level, but is over blessedly quick-like.)</p><p>And when you alight, for a moment, on the roof of a particularly tall hivestem-analogue, you see her.</p><p>She’s standing on the edge, gazing out at the burning city. All you can get of her at first is her silhouette. Her horns are <em>crazy,</em> gigantic, wild spiral things. She’s holding weapons at her sides, in both hands. Pyralspite shifts uneasily under your strut pods. You understand two things, as you look at her.</p><p>A: You have never met anyone as dangerous as this, ever. That sixth sense that every troll has, that lets you know your standing on the leaderboard, should an interaction turn into a scrap? It tells you, without any kind of doubt, that you - <em> you, </em> the legislacerator five colors above her sitting on the back of a dragon’yyd who just destroyed a city - are the <em>underdog</em> here.</p><p>B: You have never met anyone in as much suffering as this girl.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>
  <span class="sollux"><span class="font-big">♊︎</span></span><br/>
</p><p>“Shittttt, how the glub my best buoy doin’ tonite,”</p><p>It would be better if it hurt.</p><p>Obviously it does fucking hurt, it hurts so <em>goddamn</em> much that you’ve almost lost the ability to feel it, the hurt where your life used to be is a <em>pit</em> in the bottom of your thorax, Prospit of your shameglobes but Derse of your digestion bladder. It feels like a tractache, like your abdominal sausages are clogged up with McMiracles and your acid tract is protesting, except it never goes away and can’t be told to go fuck off and die no matter how much antacid you were to hypothetically shove down your ignorance shaft.</p><p>It’s dull, by now. Faded into the background of your existence like white noise that can’t be tuned out or filtered. It looks like Kankles’ face, and sounds like Meulin’s laugh, and feels like Rosa’s lips and touchstubs and nook - and like the absence of all those things.</p><p>So it’d be better if it hurt, if you spent your whole life now in constant, unbearable agony, or if you could truly, properly hate this rancid fucking <em>bitch</em> in front of you, give her the absolute one hundred and twenty-two percent utter platonic <em>loathing</em> that her miserable fucking walking <em>genocide</em> of a self deserves from you and also from every <em>shitting</em> troll who’s ever been hatched.</p><p>But you don’t have either one of those. The Empire’s helmstechs are clever, of course. The helmscolumn doesn’t <em>hurt.</em> It burrowed into your appendages and torso pillar when you were installed. Synced itself to your genetic code and weaved itself into the meat of your body and wound itself around your neural linkages. You’re a part of the ship, now. It’s hitched to your synaptic impulses. When the order comes down from the bridge to calculate, or project, or jump, it’s like the input of a part of your own thinkpan. The synthflesh of the column cradles your limbs like well-mixed sopor, like the embrace of your lusus. When you comply, with what feels like a perfectly natural impulse, you get a rush of epinephrine and a supply of dopamine, satisfaction at a job well done, only a <em>bit</em> higher than what your body would normally supply itself with so you don’t build up a tolerance.</p><p>(The Empire is cruel, and sick, and unutterably fucking <em>brilliant</em> at being both of those things. You and Rosa understood that. You don’t think Kankri ever quite did, really.)</p><p>And her? You can’t hate her, even though you do hate her. She’s pretty much the only person you know, anymore. You’re her favorite. Her Golden Treasure. She has to have you all to <em>hershellf.</em></p><p>If you really hated her, you’d be alone, forever, and then you’d truly and irrevocably lose what’s left of your mind.</p><p>“Pretty much the same as every night,” you grunt. Your voice doesn’t get used much. She’s the only one you have to talk to. “Still bored, because we’re not at lightspeed.”</p><p>“Whale we gonna fix that right up reel soon, babe,” she says. She paps your cheek too hard. She does this a lot. It’s always too hard. You can never quite tell what she means by it. You hate yourself that you like it a little bit. “Got a nice big juicy fish lined up we gonna spear, and ya gonna throw us right in their underbelly,” Her frond collides with your face again.</p><p>“If you keep doing that you’re gonna knock my head off one of these nights,”</p><p>She smiles her sickening-sweet sea-reptile smile. “I’d never do anything to hurt my favorite buoy,” she whispers. Her voice sounds like sharkskin when it’s that quiet. “Ya so special. Ain’t ebber been anyfin or anemoneone like you.” You know she means it, which is the worst part. She <em>really</em> thinks she loves you.</p><p>She spends a few minutes talking about nothing, admiring her one-of-a-kind yellow trophy, and you find yourself listening, because she’s all you’ve got. She’s talking about all the stuff she’s excited to steal from the next invasion target - one of the strike groups has hit something that’s putting up enough of a fight to interest her, so she’s turning the <em>Condescension</em> and the vanguard fleet around to go join that particular interstellar skirmish. She’s bragging about the new armaments she’s getting installed on the ship before you go.</p><p>“Yeah, I’ve felt every shitty sunslamming rivet of those fucking guns getting put in,” you grouse at her. (She’s tall enough to look you in the ocular even up in the helmscolumn.) “They’re half a generation out of date, less efficient with the power grid than what we already had, and they’re fucking <em>phased-plasma batteries</em> - why the fuck would you put in phased-plasma?” Her face is turning into a little surprise-noodle shape that barely fits around her shark-fangs. “Those are analogous to sub-current Fleet tech <em>and</em> they stop being good at killing anything at a troll-equivalent technology level once you bring down its force fields. This is a side-grade at <em>best,</em> and you had it installed because it was <em>new and shiny</em> and I bet whoever won the contract for it had good advertising,”</p><p>“Ain’t nomoby told me anyfin like this,” she says, after a moment. You have no clue what she’s thinking.</p><p>“Maybe that’s because you’re <em>Her Imperious Fucking Condescension,”</em> you tell her, “And everyone assumes that if you hear anything you don’t like, you’ll <em>fork them, because you do that, constantly,”</em> Yellow spittle gets on the lens of one of her shitty glam goggles.</p><p>There’s no bad outcome, here. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe she listens to you, and a whole lot of lives and resources don’t get wasted on her need to glam up her deathship, and maybe somewhere Kankri and Rosa’s angry ghosts will be proud of you. Or, maybe this is finally the time when she gets fed up with your lip, and she has to find herself another helmsman.</p><p>You’ll take any of the above.</p><p>But she just lays a hand on your face again, disgustingly fucking tender, and gives you your top-off.</p><p>It comes over you, into you. You can’t explain it. You can’t describe it. You just feel something, pressing into you, flowing into you. Just like the helmscolumn neurostructure, it’s an intrusion that your body can’t help but enjoy and lean into. Your skin and flesh and nerves soak it up and you ... live. More. You get younger, or maybe you ... get older less? You swear you can feel senescence reversing itself inside your body in real time. She won’t, or can’t tell you what it is. Maybe it really is just the touch of the Empress. A blessing from the highest blood.</p><p>(Ha ha. 'Blessing.')</p><p>Then she gives you a big smile, says “Thanks for the finput,” and swings her hips out of the block. You stare at her ass as she goes. You gotta get your satisfaction where you can take it, in this job.</p><p>A while after she leaves, you hear chimes and clicking machinery, the sensors in the helmsblock go <em>wild,</em> and you sense someone else inside.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p><br/>
</p><p>
  <span class="aradia"><span class="font-big">♈︎</span></span><br/>
</p><p>Your lusus, who is also your jailor, talks a lot.</p><p>Usually you tune him out. But sometimes, you listen, and you hear things of value to you.</p><p>One thing he said, once, when he was talking to himself, which he does all the time, because he is a <span>馬鹿,</span> was about things he didn’t know.</p><p>‘The omniscient’, he had said, ‘have no need for beliefs and no room for delusion.’</p><p>He had paused, you assume to allow whoever he’s subjecting to his words (you love to believe that they’re imaginary) a few seconds to reply, and then he’d said, ‘That’s true. But the gaps in my knowledge exist by design. They are the pillars of shadow on which my comprehensive vision is built. Necessary pockets of void meant to effectuate outcomes I've foreseen and which will require my influence. Each dark pocket, in time, will be filled.’</p><p>You don’t pay attention to much of anything your jailor says. You <em>hear</em> it, of course - through him comes the will of your master, so you (literally) cannot fail to heed it - but you don’t listen. His self-obsessed monologues are the verbal pailing of someone who is unfortunately aware of exactly how important and powerful he is, only without the potential value to the mother grub that actual pailing offers. They are mission data, nothing more, stripped for any detail relevant to what you are required to do each time he sends you out, everything else discarded (much as your master intends to discard everything of this timeline he doesn’t immediately care for) and ultimately forgotten. The <span>糞便</span> that comes out of the ignorance tunnel that he doesn’t have are not worth the space they take up in your pan.</p><p>But sometimes, ever so <em>very</em> rarely, he says something that sticks with you, and he actually teaches you something.</p><p>On that occasion, he taught you that there can be value in not knowing something.</p><p>You know how this goes. You are <span>生まれる 終了.</span> Hatched at the terminus, when everything is dead. Your jailor is there at the <span>初め,</span> having always been there, and having always known you, in reverse. He raises you, at the end of his life, and the beginning of yours, and sends you back to kill the world.</p><p>You wreak havoc all across history, thoughtless and pointless, driving trolls to be their worst, most desperate selves, and in doing so engraving yourself forever in your rightful place as your species’ <span>死神.</span> You arrange for the destruction of the rivals to your future liberator, who is also your murderer, ensuring her ascension to the throne and the beginning of her twenty-three hundred sweep reign. You whisper in her hear ducts just how great a threat the rebel saint poses to her imperial order, and you set her on the path to his destruction. You lead the <span>海賊</span> to the auction where the saint’s mother is sold, which one night far in her future will lead her to play the vital part in the moment that undoes her matesprit’s rebellion.</p><p>You know all of these things are true. Some of them you have not done yet, but you know that you will do them and how they will happen.</p><p>(You know, because you have met what they bring into being. You have stood in his shadow, once, that one time when you thought you might actually escape. You have looked into the windows of his soul and seen the horrible cold light of inevitability, felt the chains of his will upon your being.)</p><p>
  <span>彼 既に 此処.</span>
</p><p>These things, you know. These things are <span>一定座標.</span></p><p>But there are things that are not <span>一定.</span> Things that are adjacent to the will of the timeline, that do not affect what must happen one way or another.</p><p>So as you travel the timestream, searching for people to kill and things to destroy in accordance with your jailor’s design, sometimes you encounter things that have no meaning - and in their irrelevance, you find something like solace.</p><p>(It is not solace. Not peace. There is no peace for you, being as you are both the water of the flow of time and trapped in its current. But sometimes, for a moment, you can cling to a stone in the middle of it, and catch your breath.)</p><p>And the best of these things are those patches of shadow he described. Things you did not know of, things that surprise you - because, perhaps, by definition, for something to be unexpected, it cannot be a part of your master’s hateful design.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>When the rebel saint dies, you go to visit those he leaves behind. Why, you do not know, and never in your totally limited immortal lifespan will you understand it.</p><p>(Perhaps it was hearing his final curse, as you stood atop a nearby hivestem to watch that vital part of history slot into place. Perhaps it was hearing the cry of someone with nothing to lose, and no reason to keep his anger and his hatred sealed inside him.</p><p>In that moment, you hated him, for he both lived and died free.)</p><p>You stand on the deck of a ship in the <span>海賊</span> fleet, a ghost in the storm and the salt spray, listening to the sounds of their perverse amorousness.</p><p>You are a dark shape with great horns, revealed just for one instant to the saint’s lover by a flash of lightning, as she flees through the wilds, grief her trail, tears her spoor.</p><p>And then, you are an intruder, in the deepest sanctum of your liberator. No alarm blares. No security teams gather to repel boarders. This entire universe from beginning to end is your rotting, poisoned garden, all of it open to you. You have the power to go anywhere or when, and do anything, and you have no freedom at all.</p><p>In the heart of her void-borne fortress, he hangs from a mass of biowire and vat-grown nerve. You look at him for a long moment, at the living hell you have delivered him to, and then go to leave.</p><p>“Who’s there?” he growls. You can feel the air crawling over your exoskeleton as telekinetic force probes at you. You are shocked.</p><p>That shock is innervating. You do not know of this moment occurring, so it cannot be significant. And if it would unmoor the timeline and contradict your master’s will, you would not be doing this. You understand well the terms of your enslavement, by now.</p><p>So you walk towards him.</p><p>As you come into the sight of his physical oculars, he glares at you from a place of high contempt.</p><p>“Who the freefalling shit are you?” he demands. </p><p>You are not used to being regarded in this way. You scowl, irritated, and tilt your horns in his direction.</p><p>“What,” he spits out, “is that supposed to impress me? Ooh, look, some skanky overfunded Handmaid cosplayer trespassing in the Condescension’s helmsblock, like I’ve never seen <em> that </em> before,”</p><p>You tilt your head at him, skeptically.</p><p>“Don’t give me that,” he bitches, even though you haven’t said anything. “She straps cosplayers to the laser batteries and freeblasts them into space. And nobody ever comes in here because I think she would turn their useless nooks inside out and force-feed them their own membranes if they ever fucked with me. So this is obviously impossible. But impossible is not even <em>close</em> to the weirdest most screwed up thing I’ve ever stuck in my ganderbulbs. So what I’m saying is, fuck you, either get out of my hive or show me your tits,”</p><p>Each word rips free of his squawk blister like he’s spitting out his own fangs. Talking clearly hurts, and yet he keeps doing it. You’re confused. It’s not an enjoyable feeling, but that in itself is exciting.</p><p>Casually, you pull your kimono open.</p><p>The Helmsman emits a ragged barkbeast-whistle. “Fuck!” he says. “Sick, babe. <em>She</em> never shows me her ‘spheres. Bitch.”</p><p>“<span>とにかく肛門括約筋の鑑賞者のように見える,</span>” you mutter.</p><p>“The fuck did you call me,”</p><p>You do not remember the last time someone <span>口答え</span> to you. In your life, <span>口答え</span> results in physical harm.</p><p>“I said you look more like an appreciator of anal sphincters,” you say. These were your first words to him.</p><p>“Fuck the shit out of you,” he froths.</p><p>“Would you like to,” you retort.</p><p>“Do I look like someone getting any nook?? The only bulge I see is the universe’s throbbing slimy one when it bends me over and ruins me every night of my garbage life, fucker. But don’t you insult me by implying I gotta pick one. I love both ass <em>and</em> titties,” He appraises you <span>エッチ.</span> “You got better ‘spheres than her, but her ass is <em>way</em> nicer. You look like a stick,”</p><p>You cover yourself again and turn to leave, humming an irreverent song to annoy him.</p><p>“Hold it the fuck up,” he shouts, as you go to summon your clockwork majyyks. “That’s the Sailor Other Moon theme song,”</p><p>You pause, and look over your shoulder.</p><p>“Bitch,” he snarls, “I. Fucking. <em>Love.</em> Sailor Other Moon.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p><br/>
<br/>
<span class="terezi"><span class="font-big">♎︎</span></span><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>Pyralspite is un-chill beside you.</p><p>You get that. This foxy maroon could probably kill you both with one claw, that’s the vibe you’re getting off her anyway. She smells like ground-up razor blades and music played all wrong, with some subtle notes of existential despair and of death walking Alternia, just to spice things a little. Pyralspite is getting it too, you’re sure, and she doesn’t like it, and she <em>really</em> doesn’t like that you got off of her back and put even less between yourself and this troll.</p><p>You project chillness in your mind towards your lusus. You have a good feeling about this. Or, well, a <em>really</em> bad feeling, but it’s not a <em>threatening</em> bad feeling!</p><p>“Shit, grrrl,” you say, “I didn’t think anyone but the Empress could rock horns that big without developing serious long-term irregularities in their posture pole,”</p><p>She swivels her head towards you, and you catch a glimpse of her face over her shoulder. Her lips smell like dikes just barely holding back boiling water. Her eyes smell like lasers ranging for firing solutions.</p><p>“Go back to your mission,” she says. You think you were expecting her voice to be raw and ruined, like someone who’s had too many bad trips and downed too much sugar, but she sounds like a computer. Diction like a cerulean spook. Perfect. </p><p>Soulless. </p><p>Your reaction to this is to stand with your canesword in front of you, tip down, touching the rooftop, your fronds folded atop the handle. Put on a big, professional smile. Teeth out. Respectful, but still not to be effed with. In other words, the same way you react to every other lethal, gnarly danger you have faced, in your capacity as the Legislacerature’s Neophyte of the Sweep.</p><p>“We’ve done more than enough to light up the whole city. Blaze’ll consume the primary habitation clusters within the hour. Anyone who gets out, the marines can mop up. Mission’s 100%, effective,” you say, and her pre-existant glare gets bigger and nastier for a sec.</p><p>“Yep,” You lean back, roll your hips around against your cane. Pop your posture pole a couple times. Reach up and pat Pyralspite’s snout. “Did our job. Well within estimates. Nothing to do now but take ourselves a little impromptu shore leave. Shit, babe,” you widen your smile at her - you aren’t sure what this chick is, but she’s no Fleet officer, “When was the last time <em>you</em> got any shore leave? What, did they put you through a uniform press when you were hatched and it never wore off?”</p><p>She loosens her queen square’s mug by like a millimeter. There’s like one pixel of sneer in her face now. “That’s more like it!” You say, cheerfully, with your best smiling-while-being-congratulated-by-some-shitty-smug-violet-admiral-for-the-great-job-you-did-genociding-a-bunch-of-enemies-of-the-Empire face, “Sick, babe, you almost showed an emotion right there! I think one fiber of your facial musculature maybe twitched a little! You must have an <em>unbeatable</em> prodder face.”</p><p><span>“出向く 併せる バ イオリンの頭 あなたの性器に”</span>, she mutters.</p><p>“Damn, grrl!” you cackle, “At least buy a troll dinner first before you get kinky!!”</p><p>She stares at you. “What?” your ganderbulbs, you know, are inscrutable behind your red moonglasses. “Didn’t think I grok East Alternian? You think I’m some kinda lameo ten-for-a-caegar neophyte?”</p><p><span>“いいえ,”</span> she says. “You are a sister to death.” She’s silhouetted against the red glare of the burning city. It hurts, stings in your thorax, though you don’t let it show. It mocks your righteous title, the one you’re so ‘honored’ to have received so young. </p><p>“Well so are you, it looks like,” you say. “So, from one sister to another,” You decaptcha your personal board, “Wanna play some Troll Go?”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. light a matchmaker</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>
  <span class="aradia"> <span class="font-big">♈︎</span> </span>
</p><p>You appear at her side, in an inconsequential moment, when she is not herself. (Almost every moment is inconsequential, so there are many to choose from.)</p><p>There is an <span>不可知</span> feeling, left in the hollow of your thoracic cavity after you leave the legislacerator. You think you may have felt it before, but you are not at all sure when.</p><p>What you do know is that you want to play with her again.</p><p>There are few truly essential moments on her timeline. All that is really necessary is that she be on Alternia at the appointed time, on her path to the <span>海賊’s</span> trial. If any particular event could turn her from that course, you would know. (Of course you would, because such a thing happening is <span>無理だよ.</span>) When you want to see her again, you simply choose one, and arrive.</p><p>“We have three standard wipes until the <em>Contempestuous</em> battlegroup arrives,” she’s saying. “I’ve factored in the average relativistic drift and the average jump slippage for ships lost in transit. We’re going to have fourteen additional capital ships, plus or minus two, plus fighters, for a total of between twenty-five and twenty-seven ships. I can supply dossiers on all fourteen plus’s captains, acting-captains, and senior officers. Also, one of said captains is wanted by the Cruellest Bar. I’ve attached the details to the upload so you can decide who you want to take her post after I bring her in,”</p><p>She is sitting in an office. She is surrounded by enormous, towering stacks of paper. Automatic filing machines rattle and buzz and attempt futilely to keep up with the influx, fed by hanging transmission arteries that feed into the walls, heavy and dripping with data. The law-woman herself is facing a screen from which the words of an <span>傲慢 華々しい脳のためのたわごと</span> are emanating. (You have no idea who this troll is, nor do you care even a little bit, but if there is anything you know in the universe, it is what a <span>華々しい糞</span> sounds like.) The words that don’t sound like hers are coming out in between the constant <span>口おなら</span> of the asshole at the other end. “Yes, captain,” she says, when he stops babbling for long enough for her to get a squawk in. </p><p>She notices you, and it’s impressive that she does not flinch or give away the presence of anything unusual to the <span>馬鹿</span> she is talking to. She continues doing so, and the longer you observe, the less like herself she sounds. She is a perfectly streamlined delivery system for facts and figures, like one of the tabulating machines around her workstation. You cannot imagine this person meeting your East Alternian invective with equal vigor, or grinning at you across a Go board and cackling at each move.</p><p>“...we have enough replacement focus coils to sustain beam weapons for between three and five major fleet actions, but only enough mass-driver ammunition for one action, <em> maybe </em> two if we really scrimp. I have a list of possible solutions here, depending on whether you want to requisition more, scavenge, melt down spare parts, or redistribute ammunition stocks from the rest of the fleet.” She puts down a tablet. “That’s the last line item. Anything else, commander?”</p><p>“That’ll be all, Redglare,” the <span>馬鹿</span> says. “Stellar work as always.”</p><p>“Glory to the Empress,” she responds, simply.</p><p>“Glory to the Empress.” The connection breaks.</p><p>“You just love appearing when you aren’t invited, don’t you,” the law-woman says, wheeling to face you.</p><p>You don’t return her gaze. You’re examining the contents of her office. “You are the one who approached me,” you tell her, “despite the obvious possibility that I would obliterate both you and your lusus as a result.” </p><p>“Obvious, was it?”</p><p>
  <span>“私はそれに応答しません のため それはどれほど愚かです.”</span>
</p><p>“Full of yourself, aren’t you.”</p><p><span>“いいえ,</span>” You say, vaguely in her direction. “I just acknowledge true things, like any person who isn’t insane or stupid.”</p><p>“That’s true!” the law-woman says. She’s still smiling at you with her huge mouthful of teeth. A threat display in the face of a threat so overwhelming as to make it completely pointless. Spitting into a <span>津波</span> in the hopes of stopping it. “I have mad respect for that. Just keeping you on your walkstubs, girrl.”</p><p>“These aren’t Fleet-standard slippage formulae,” you say.</p><p>You’re looking at one of her datapads. She pauses. “You know what standard slippage formulae look like?”</p><p><span>“私は次のように見えますか ある種の 平凡 十  のために 円 死神?</span>”</p><p>That draws a ringing laugh from her talkblaster, and she swings a frond to clap you on the back.</p><p><em> Instantly </em> there is a mutual blur of steel and your needles are against her face. The rest of her cane bounces away across the floor of the officeblock as her blade is against your throat.</p><p>You stare at one another for a moment meaningless in the scope of your immortal, civilization-spanning life, and yet that somehow feels like it goes on for hours.</p><p>“Nope,” she says, the ganderbulbs behind her tinted moonglasses never wavering, <em> “definitely </em> not. I’d lay real good odds you’re one of a kind.”</p><p>“If you did not have a <span>運命</span>, I would have destroyed you.” You both put your weapons away.</p><p>The law-woman laughs again. “If you keep saying that, one night I’ll maybe even believe it, Red Dead! Why do you know standard Fleet slippage formulae?”</p><p>“I have been everywhere,” you say.</p><p>“That’s not an answer, hon.”</p><p>The answer is that you have had to familiarize yourself with a wide variety of regulations from almost every Imperial organization and subdivision, so as to better manipulate them, to most effectively destabilize them, shape their cultures further towards expansionism and predatory viciousness. “I have seen every part of the Fleet. Not standard relativistic drift maps, either. Or standard supply expenditure calculations.”</p><p>“I do all the calculations myself.” She’s retrieved her cane and slipped the sword back into its place. “They work better for this strike group.”</p><p>“You are a legislacerator. Not a <span>官僚.”</span></p><p>“I’m both. It’s not so weird. I’m teal. It’s all in my steering apparatus housing.” </p><p>“I have met and killed a lot of teals. None of them are like you.”</p><p>She turns away. “That’s probably true. I’m going to be the best of the best.”</p><p>“<span>はい,</span>” you say, truthfully, “<span>あなたはなれます.”</span></p><p>She looks over her shoulder at you for a few seconds.</p><p>“Is that some kind of crunk Handmaid prophecy from beyond the realm of life?”</p><p>“<span>それが真実だ.”</span></p><p>She looks at you for a moment more, and then goes back to her data-engines.</p><p>“Why didn't you sound like yourself?”</p><p>The law-woman pauses. “What does that mean?”</p><p>“I know what you sound like. When you were talking to that <span>馬鹿-”</span></p><p>“My indigo commander,”</p><p>“To that <span>ブルー 先任将校  馬鹿,</span> you did not sound like you. You sounded,” you stare at her, unforgiving, “like a ten-for-a-caegar neophyte.”</p><p>She gives you another very wide, vicious smile, full of many teeth and empty of any warmth.</p><p>“Think some bottom-a-the-leaderboards teal <em>scrub</em> could do what I do? The work of <em>half the <span>官僚</span></em> in a flotilla this size? You think I’m some kinda <em>amateur?”</em></p><p>“You could be no such thing,” you say. “You have a <span>運命</span>.”</p><p>You realize, suddenly, that your own lips have pulled back from your fangs. This almost never happens, so you are unsettled by it.</p><p>You lock your two red gazes, and then, as always, it is her who yields.</p><p>“Look, hot-blood-hot-bod, obviously you comin’ around is always an experience I’m not gonna forget for a hella long-ass time, which, y’know, I appreciate it! I don’t remember the last time I remembered anything specific I did. Pff. That’s a technically sound statement but shit if it doesn’t sound fake. But, anyway, I got a real full mealplane, so, if there’s nothing else,”</p><p>“Why didn’t you sound like you.”</p><p>“For reals, Handy, I got no time for this,” She resumes her typing. It’s almost frenzied. She has four screens, three at face level and another above, and her attention darts between all four, tapping at several different consoles.</p><p>“I want to talk to you.”</p><p>“Well, sucks! Not everyone can just go zipping around the universe doing the dark bidding of fate or whatever the fuck it is you do! Some of us have <em> jobs,” </em> She gets to the end of a line and taps a key, hard, and yet another sheet of paper starts to emerge. “Some of us have five Fleet departments waiting on reports, and flex requisitions to write to twelve supply officers on twelve different ships to tell them they may or may not have to do whatevs, based on what the previously discussed blue commander idiot finally decides,”</p><p>You look for a place to sit down on one of the tables behind her desk. There is no such place. You push some of the papers and folders and datapads aside with your telekinesis and they drop to the floor in a heap.</p><p>She jerks in her seat. “What is wrong with you?!”<br/>
<br/>
“You don’t have another chair.”<br/>
<br/>
Her claws clang on the console as she directs the namesake of her title at you. “Maybe because I don’t lay out my office for the convenience of reality-bending psychotic <em> bitches </em> who never learned <em> manners or boundaries from their lusii,” </em></p><p>“Now you sound like you. Why don’t you talk to your <span>ブルー 先任将校  馬鹿 そのように?”</span></p><p><em> “GTFOUTTA here, Handy.” </em> She stoops to start picking up the files. “Gonna take me <em> forever </em> to re-sort all this, I was <em>already</em> behind,”</p><p>You roll your eyes, and stop time.</p><p>“There,” you say, as she goes stiff, looking around at the unnaturally still air. “Now play Go with me.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="aradia"><br/>
<span class="font-big"><br/>
♈︎</span><br/>
<br/>
</span>
</p><p>You visit him in the future.</p><p>Your timeline is flexible. You are bound to causality, to inevitability, but not to linearity. Each time you see him, you both are older; not in flesh - you are ageless by the will of your master, and he immortal by the touch of your liberator - but very much so in spirit. Every time you skip over the sweeps into the future, he hangs heavier in the helmscolumn. His eyes glow dimmer, and his spitting causticness grows less and less spirited. You are harder, and harder, forged by the endless millennia of murder into a weapon of tyrium steel, as hard and sharp as your needles, a perfect instrument, drifting further and further away from the soul of a living troll.</p><p>He is the only one who understands. The ages have left him behind, too. Eventually, his friends and his clade and his lovers fade completely into history, into obscurity, become legends. The violet royals at the time of his enslavement succumb to age, to time, are consumed by entropy. But he endures. Your liberator never tires of him, treasures him more than any admiral or retainer or peerless warrior, and so he never dies. You and he endure, alone, miserable, but in your misery you have one another.</p><p>Often, you do not even speak when you are with him. You simply pull the block out of sync with time, for a short while, and you sit. Often he does not even open his oculars, but you know he is aware of your presence. Sometimes his psionics prod at you, questing and curious and tender in a way you have never been touched in your life. You do not like physical fronds laid on you, but his telekinetic touch is different.</p><p>Sometimes, he looks at you directly, and you feel his mind cradle your cheek.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="sollux">
    <span class="font-big"><br/>
♊︎</span>
  </span>
</p><p><br/>
The next time you meet her, she’s not alone.</p><p>“Sucks to be you,” you say to her plus one, who is the cutest troll you’ve seen in a <em>really</em> long time. “If you’re here to legislacerate I don’t think I legally exist, and she <em>definitely</em> doesn’t.”</p><p>She’s wearing red moonglasses, but you can see the skeptical look she’s giving you. She twists her skull a degree or two towards ‘the Handmaid’. “Just so I understand this correctly. You have two friends, and the other one is the <em>Condescension’s gogdamn helmsman?”</em></p><p>‘The Handmaid’ doesn’t say anything, as is so often the case. “She answer as many of your questions like that as she does mine?”</p><p>“Obviously I can’t know,” Red-glasses says, “I’ve never been present for you asking her a question before.” She grins. “But, also, definitely yes.” She takes a few steps towards you in your column. She has a big, pretty mouth full of big, pretty teeth. “Here, let’s try it. ‘How do your reality-warping psionics work?’”</p><p>No response. The teal (the legislacerator, rather. Sorry, Kankri) smirks at you.</p><p>“Well, yeah,” you grunt, “That’s a soft result, though. Does it still prove the point if the question’s inaccurate? They aren’t psionics.”</p><p>Her brows crank up at you. “Aren’t they?”</p><p>“I am literally <em>The</em> Ψioniic,” you snap, “All the thousands if not <em>tens of thousands</em> of fleetgrade psionics in this vast, majestic <em>nookheap</em> of an empire, and <em>I’m</em> the one who they stick with that title. If I don’t know <em>who the fuck does,”</em></p><p>You leer at the babe who may or may not be the Handmaid. “<span>します 突き通る 君と君の題名,”</span> she snips at you.</p><p>You give Red-glasses a look. “She just said something about pailing to me.”</p><p>She returns it with one of long-suffering understanding. “Yes. Specifically she said she was gonna use your title as a pailing aid. I have <em>officially ripcorded out</em> on trying to translate the actual meaning of anything she says.”</p><p>You laugh. Laughing still hurts but you do it anyway. You almost never get to laugh anymore. “Maybe it’s a metaphor.”</p><p>“Maybe!”</p><p>“<span>それはではない 比喩. します 釜を掘る あなたと君の愚かな言葉.”</span></p><p>“She said-”</p><p>“I know what she said. Eventually you stop needing to speak East Alternian to know when she’s being gross.”</p><p>The ‘lacerator’s fronds are still clasped around the trunk of her cane behind her back. “I don’t even understand the <em>mechanics</em> of this proposed sex act.”</p><p>“Whatever, babe,” you say, “I don’t give a fuck, I’ll try it. With you if she’s not up for it.”</p><p>Her shades glint as she cocks her head. She doesn’t look impressed. “Does everyone you hang out with expect me to put out on the first date?”</p><p>“<span>私養う 最もだけ強 鬼女 主題に我  彼らにあれ.”</span></p><p>“Is she for real about any of this," Red-glasses asks you. "Does she actually want us to pail or is she just being horrible to be horrible?”</p><p>“Who the fuck are you again?”</p><p>She sets her cane on the ground, and meets your ganders directly. “Redglare. Neophyte of the Cruellest Bar.”</p><p>You give ‘the Handmaid’ a stinky look. “Why did you bring a ‘lacerator here?”</p><p>“I talk to both of you. I wanted to talk to you both in one place, instead of wasting time going to where and when you both are.”</p><p>“And why do you talk to her?”</p><p>No answer. “Fucking typical,” you snort, “Well shit, ‘Redglare’, she did us a favor, now we got someone to bitch about her with,”</p><p>Her grin widens. Shit she’s cute. “You think she’s really the Handmaid?”</p><p>“Fuck<em>me, </em> girl,”<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
(She does.)</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Writing the ancestors is always a unique challenge, that of synthesizing what we know of their stories with what we know of their pre-scratch selves as actual people, into a single complete character. I like how Latula/Redglare came out here. I also have a lot of fun with Fleet worldbuilding, and I really dig the image of Redglare's office, this overworked bureaucrat's workspace only full of troll honeycomb computers and weird alien detritus, big gross cables and blood vessels coming out of the ceiling and walls.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. burns half as long</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><br/>
<br/>
<span class="terezi">
    <span class="font-big">♎︎</span>
  </span>
</p><p><br/>
You climb the helmscolumn like a tree. Mituna’s limbs are the branches and his bulge is a hanging vine. You wrap his torso with your strut sticks and push yours into him.</p><p>It’s like a perfectly machined socket and bolt. His nook pumps around you like it hasn’t eaten in sweeps. This is the third time now, and he’s still every bit as desperate for you. Helmsmen don’t pail, according to regulations. You imagine it’s been a long time since he got any action. “You make a girl feel appreciated,” you whisper to him.</p><p>“I appreciate the FUCK out of you, babe,” He moans. His rumblespheres flutter and purr at you, pitching up each time your bulge moves inside you. A person’s ‘spheres tell you what their squawkbox won’t.</p><p>You don’t even know how you feel about him, or what this <em>is.</em> You just know that when you’re with him it’s off the <em>chain.</em> You’ve been with peeps before who naturally get your drive core firin’, trolls you just <em>work</em> with on a concupiscent level, quads or no quads - but <em>never</em> like this. He runs so <em>hot,</em> you’ve had lowblood partners before but they were <em>nothing</em> like this, it’s like fucking a solar flare. His body is <em>stuffed</em> with psi energy, it just bubbles and overflows out of him, when you’re this close to him you can actually feel it radiating off of his skin. The same stuff that makes him so valuable to the Condesce, it draws you in, too - along with everything else about Mituna that draws you to him, like a flutterbug to a flame, pulls you into his nook, and he makes needy sounds against you as you dig your claws into his back. He’s stripped down, his suit unzipped and hanging off of him the best you and Ultramaroon can manage, down around his ankles and slung out down his back.</p><p>You <em>might</em> be able to <em>just</em> barely do this under your own power (you don’t really get to grind on your injury panel much anymore, but legislacerators have to keep in shape, your strut pod muscles are no joke). You don’t have to, though. As always, the Handmaid sits next to you, perpendicular to where you and the Ψioniic meet. Her telekinesis holds you up, supports you beneath your thighs like a pair of steady fronds, letting you and your bulge focus on him. </p><p>Meanwhile, she stares at you, her face the same as ever, but with oculars opened just a bit wider, and touches herself. You tried to get her involved, to thank her for bringing you together - but she does not like to be touched.</p><p>He doesn’t have much stamina. Mituna’s body is sustained by the ship, but if he ever had real muscle on him, it’s wasted away now. You keep going for a long time after he’s finished. You feel an exotic, <em>totally wigged-out</em> feeling around your bucket zone, something in your nook that works like a nookworm but perfect and regular in how it moves. Red Rocket has one grasper pointed in your direction, TK shimmering between you, and is fucking your nook with a pailing toy made of psionic force while your bulge is still inside him. You keep your limbs wrapped around him, both your bellowsacs working to full capacity.</p><p>And when you’re both finished, you just relax your seedflaps and dump your slurry onto the floor of the helmsblock. It’s straight freefalling <em>psycho</em> (look at you, you’re picking up Mituna’s vocab) how good it feels. To let it just pour all over, no bucket, no decorum, no nothing. To be free, for just a few hours, from HIC’s ruthless reproductive regime.</p><p>From the demand not to waste a single drop, because any of those drops could produce another soldier for the Empire.<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>“So,” you say.<br/>
<br/>
You sit, sweaty and drained, wearing your tabard and moonglasses and nothing else. The rest of your uniform’s laid out over one of the thinner cables like a laundry line.</p><p>“So,” Mituna croaks. He still sounds like a zombie talking through a badly tuned voice scrambler that hates living when he talks. (When he pails it’s an aural nightmare zone in his squawkbox. You’re starting to think it’s cute.)</p><p>“So. You should not be alive.”</p><p>“This how you sweet talk all your bucket-buddies?” he glowers.</p><p>“I’ve seen the records. Priority-fuschia helmstroll requisitions - those are only supplies ductmarked for the <em>Condescension.</em> That was in Sweep: Five-Seven-Three point Thirty-One of the Imperial calendar.” You fold your fronds over the dragon-head handle of your cane. “At the same time, the title ‘Ψiioniic’ was registered, and has never lapsed. There has never been another priority-fuschia helmstroll requisition.”</p><p>He’s staring at you, vision twofold hard, his face tight. He smells like suffering, too. Handy’s is a choking black cloud, rotting, necrotized, ancient. Mituna’s is electric, warm, like an exposed nerve. “That was one hundred and forty sweeps ago. The longest recorded lifespan of a yellowblood is forty-seven and a half sweeps.” You hold his gaze. “You should not be alive.”</p><p>“Her Imperious Condescension preserves his life.”</p><p>You’ve known her a while now, so you’re not <em>that</em> surprised, when she stays quiet for so long and then re-enters the conversation so abruptly. But she manages to keep surprising you, with the <em>specifics</em> of the stuff she says.</p><p>"Does the helmscolumn keep him kicking?” You glance down at where his legs disappear into the meat of the ship’s hardware. “...sorry. Very unradical choice of words.” He snorts. “But, no, there’s no way. There are fuschiagrade requisitions for helmstrolls going back <em>hundreds</em> of sweeps, in line with the average burnout rate. A bit lower than the average burnout rate, honestly - the <em>Condescension</em> only gets the best candidates, obviously…”</p><p>Disgust slithers into your snifftubes, emanating from up on the column, and you blink with shock. Mituna’s stopped looking at you. Apparently Ramrod doesn’t notice. “She doesn’t need technology. She has a <span>運命,</span> and the power it grants her. She has taken so much life in her existence, that she can, if she wishes, grant it to others. But, as is her fate, it will never avail her anything, or grant her any true satisfaction.”</p><p>You sponge tries to process the fucking <em>gnarly</em> implications of this pronouncement and also grok the rank vibes coming off of Mituna. “You keep sayin’ these things, Handjob, with absolutely no <em>imaginable</em> way to back them up,”</p><p>“They are the tr-”</p><p>“Yeah, yeah, <em>you only say true things,</em> come <em>on, grrl,”</em> you snarl, “Has it <em>for real never occurred to you</em> that something being ‘the truth’ doesn’t automatically make whoever you’re talking to believe it?? Most trolls are just … <em>trolls,</em> they aren’t time-manipulating <em>demonesses</em> with infinite historical perspective, or whatever the <em>fuck you are,”</em></p><p>She just blinks at you, like she does, no change in her haughty, snooty mask, like nothing you’ve ever said makes any impact.</p><p>“She’s right, you know,” Mituna grunts. <em>“I</em> have more social skills than you, and I’m a <em>lighthouse.”</em></p><p>“You are a lot more than a lighthouse, babe.” You put your hands on your hips as you glare up at him. “The Empire’s doing a good enough job detrollifying you. Don’t do it to yourself.”</p><p>He stiffens as he looks at you for some reason. But, Handsy interrupts again. “How else should I act? Should I lie? Should I pretend things are true that I know are false?”</p><p>“What,” Mituna rolls his ganders, “You suddenly care about being better socialized?”</p><p><span>“いいえ,”</span>She says it so flatly that it kind of makes you start laughing, and then she says, “I want to tell the two of you the truth. Everything else I do is lying or murdering. I don’t want to lie to or murder either of you.”</p><p>Now you feel really bad for laughing. The laugh gets culled halfway out of your ignorance shaft.</p><p>“Maybe,” Mituna says, his pipette rattling and rumbling, “you could tell us your name? Not like Latula’s endless supply chain of new nicknames isn’t great and everything, but it’d be kind of nice. And also it would give her more material for nicknames, so. Big plus there.”</p><p>You grin at him, but he doesn’t really return it. He still smells wrong.</p><p><span>“いいえ,”</span> she says.</p><p>The word flops into the room like a dead frog. “...seriously?” Mituna’s voice cracks, angrily.</p><p>“I was named by someone I hate, in accordance with my own <span>運命</span>. I value nothing he has given me. I don’t see why my name should be any different. As far as the galaxy is concerned, I am the Handmaid. I am the Demoness.” Her expression is taut, her exo-layer looks like it’s stretched tight over her lovely face. “I don’t know what I am to you. I have never been this to anyone else. But I know I would rather be called the terrible stupid things you come up with, than my name.”</p><p>She gives you an even meaner look. “And that is saying something, because your nicknames are truly terrible, and I hate them.”</p><p>Your heart is breaking, but you’re grinning much too widely again.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Needlepoint talks a lot about incomprehensible things that she insists are the truth but then refuses to elaborate on, but she also doesn’t seem to have a problem with you trying to figure it out by other means, so you bring the conversation back around eventually and just ask Mituna outright.</p><p>“...so, how <em>does</em> she keep you alive?”</p><p>“...I don’t know,” he admits. “What Hands here just said is more explanation than <em>she’s</em> ever given me. She just calls it ‘the Empress’s touch’, or some hoofbeast shit like that. She… touches me. And then … I don’t die. Or get older.”</p><p>You scoot up closer to him. “What does it feel like?”</p><p>“...it feels better than anything.” he sounds haunted. Hollow. “It’s better than any drug. It’s better than sex.”</p><p>“...you sure about that?”</p><p>He grins, wearily.</p><p>“I’m sorry about before,” you say, because you know that you just have to get it out. (It’s been a long time since you really cared this much about someone’s opinion of you.) “When I was talking about … burnout stats,”</p><p>He looks down at you.</p><p>“...sorry.” You close your eyes. Your lids hurt as you squeeze them shut. “I’m sorry. When I’m not out hunting I just … I look at numbers all day. Most of those numbers are actually trolls…”</p><p>He doesn’t look back at you, but he sighs, heavily, and you feel a psionic touch brush the side of your head. Like always Mituna’s is rough, but never forceful. A strong hand, like a blue’s, but sheathed in velvet. (Ramrod’s are like infinitely adaptable but also perfect and pristine geometric shapes, existing in space.) “No. I get it.”</p><p>You look up, blinking.</p><p>“What do you think happens every time we jump,” he says. “I don’t fucking know what this ship actually does at any given time but I know wherever we go it’s something horrible. That’s what I am. I’m a delivery system for galactic misery.”</p><p>(You’re out there, processing and supporting that misery being put into action - even if you aren’t in the vanguard fleet with the flagship - so you know that he’s right. You don’t want to confirm it for him.)</p><p>“Where did you hear that word?” He asks you, out of nowhere.</p><p>“What word, grubcakes?”</p><p>“Don’t sweet-talk me.” You smirk at one another, but then his face falls. “Where did you hear ‘detrollifying?”</p><p>You take a breath, and fold your arms.</p><p>“In a book.”</p><p>You stand up, leaning on your cane. “The last helmsman requisition for the <em>Condescension</em> was made in Sweep: Five-Seven-Three point Thirty-One. The sweep before that, the infamous heretic and traitor to the throne called the Signless was executed. It is very, very hard to find information about him, or about that time. But some things are remembered. And it is written, in the book that he left behind, that he had a companion.” Now he’s not meeting your glare anymore. “A yellowblood helmsgrade psionic. With one red ocular, and one blue.”</p><p>He looks at you, for a long moment. Your grip on your canesheath is <em>way</em> too tight.</p><p>“Hey, Sailor Burgundy,” he says, “both of you leave me alone. Or at least move her around. I can’t turn away in this thing.”</p><p>“I <em>know</em> it’s you,” you step forward. “You have to tell me about him. About what you did. We still-”</p><p>“Get <em>OUT,” </em> The hanging cables shudder and the lights flicker and circuits blow out of the wall and shower the block with power transfer medium.</p><p>Ram-bam stands up. <em>“Mituna-”</em> you try.</p><p>Your sniffer fills with the smell of decaying hours, and when you have ‘bulbs and ‘ducts again you’re back in your office. Hands-on looks at you for a moment, same face as always, and then what you guess are the grinding gears of the universe’s clockwork surround her again, and she’s gone.</p><p>You look at your disaster of an office. You grab the tips of your horns and almost break them the fuck off.</p><p>Then you suck a long, <em>long</em> deep gulp of oxygen into your respiration sacs, dry-swallow an anxiolytic, and go to find the <em>direst</em> bounty on the board.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>She keeps showing up.</p><p>Is she truly ‘the Handmaid’? You don’t know. (And if she was, how would you prove it?) What does it matter, anyway. If there’s a way to really use the fact that you chillax and play strategy games with the goddess of death every couple perigees to advance your long-term agenda, you haven’t come up with anything. Any plan you could come up with to leverage it would require you to be able to control her or tell her to do anything, and <em>that</em> is definitely not possible. And, anyway, you wouldn’t want to do her that way. In this Alternia, HIC’s Alternia, to be maroon is to suffer, pretty much. And she’s the most powerful maroon you’ve ever seen or smelled - in every way. Suffering follows her like a choking cloud that can’t be aired out. You don’t think you could add to it by using her (If for no other reason than that it might finally burn out your snort barrels).</p><p>That’s apparently the only line you <em>won’t</em> cross.</p><p>The perigees pass, and the perigees turn into sweeps. In between the calculations of projected casualties and supply consumption, you run other projections, secret ones. These are in your thinkpan, no machine assistance at all, because the stuff you’re calculating can’t be recorded or known by anyone. You gauge the average lifespan of a tealblood. You factor it with the average rate of promotion for an officer through the various branches of the apparatus of the Law. The matters of Fleet policy and political leverage they can expect to have influence or authority over in those positions.</p><p>The numbers don’t add up. This equation, you can’t balance, no matter how hard you math. You cannot rise fast enough. The Fleet is too big. The Empire is too old. Too evil. </p><p>You can’t do it. Not under standard server settings, anyway.</p><p>Thankfully you have a cheat code. You have Pyralspite. You’re given missions that no other individual troll can measure up to. These are anomalies in the figures. Quadratic equations that expand the possibility space. They push the potential high score ceiling higher than should be possible.</p><p>You calculate firing solutions and streamline the culling algorithms and simulate mock-battles in the thousands. To climb the chain, you have to make the highbloods love you, you have to score better than perfect -  and so you help make the Empire more efficient at being monstrous.</p><p>You take on the impossible jobs, the white blubberbeasts of the Legislacerature, the bounties that have been on the board so long they’re jokes that just mean ‘will go on forever’. In the teal offices saying ‘when the Granduke pays for his crimes’ is like saying ‘when the Empress dies of old age.’</p><p>You track Altzea the corrupt terrorrationer kingpin to her occulted storehouse. It turns out to be hidden in the negative space between compartments where no schematics would ever show, like a secret in Troll Doom, hidden behind folding-space staplers and static jammers. You have to fight seven hot-blood gang bangers at once. They send a helmsgrade psionic after you and you tip a stack of cargo containers onto him. He, Alteza, and the rest of her crew get flattened in the crash. You 1v1 Commander Decima’s bodyguard for the right to serve Decima a warrant. You break into the Granduke’s ship, steal the proof of his repeated violations of Fleet regulations, and transmit them to the Admiralty. The duty officers are the Granduke’s clade and the message is never even entered into the records. So you clamp a mask to your face, hit the detonator in the bottom card of your sylladex, and depressurize the whole compartment. When you return to the Cruellest Bar with his severed head and hard copies of the records in a box, the other legislacerators look at you like you’re the raddest thing the mother grub ever hatched.</p><p>Fifty-three crew, some of every caste, died in space when that compartment blew.</p><p>In the active theaters of war, you fight off Mideratii swarm-forms and stop them from overrunning Pyralspite’s back, while she goes mano y mano with the hive-warden of their mother grub analogue with teeth and claws. She flies cover for your column on Designate Nineteen Twelve, and you climb out of the toxic sap of the disintegrating alien flora and hack your way back onto dry land, leaving the burgundy line troopers to drown. You crash dive straight through an ion storm on Designate M-87, exploding out of the clouds directly over an Iktir aerospace destroyer. Pyralspite bites the bridge clean out of its upper hull blister and her breath destroys the next two ships in the blockade. Electricity from the clouds arcs between your horns and the medicullers afterwards give you high odds of long-term nerve damage.</p><p>Your shackle symbol feels like it’s burning a hole in your skin. There is not enough time. You push yourself and Pyralspite harder. You are speedrunning the Alternian military-dictatorial structure.</p><p>You push too hard. In public, you are the Neophyte Redglare, the teal-colored star ascendant. In the privacy of your own pan and your own respiteblock, you are a fucking <em> wreck. </em> You are just barely held together with adhesive strips and serotonin inhibitors. (You smuggle the latter out of the lower decks, so nobody in your own department knows you’re not as strong as you look.)</p><p>And every now and then, when you’re pretty sure you’re within seconds of breaking, like the next line of code you have to write or the next time you have to lift your sword is going to be the last thing you ever do and your pan is just going to <em>shut down,</em> she turns up.</p><p>She appears other times, too. Never for long. But when you are at your absolute lowest, somehow she is always there. And she creates one of those impossible little pockets of solitude, those cubbyholes in time that defy every law of the universe you’re aware of, and she gives you time to breathe.</p><p>When you ask her why she’s doing this, why the ‘handmaiden to the angel of double death’ is bothering with a neophyte legislacerator with a sponge full of treasonous antihemoist ideas, she tells you that you have a 運命, a destiny. That her purpose is to make sure destiny happens the way it’s supposed to, and if you overwork yourself and break before then, it’ll all come undone.</p><p>You <em>almost</em> believe her. But not quite. Your sniffnode is hella sensitive, after all. You got a dragon’s snout in your face, and you know that whenever she’s with you, the smell of suffering is thick in the air, and when she leaves, it’s just a bit less so.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>You stand, knee deep in the dead, leaning on your cane like it’s actually a cane and not just a way to flex on people who use ‘real’ strife specibi to store their weapons with an extra function. The other two legislacerators you landed on this orbital platform with are dead, as are their lusii. There are still more enemies left in front of you. A lot of them. Pyralspite is somewhere above you, hunting bigger meat. You can feel her in your mind, hurtling back towards you as fast as she can, but you know she won’t make it in time.</p><p>You reached too high. You played for too long odds. Tried a permadeath run too high level for you.</p><p>And then you smell that smell, the inconceivable scent of her temporal translocation, the smell of rotting stars. Powdered crystal. Exploding sn0wballs at the bottom of a stickball match. Death and entropy. Perfectly tuned music boxes. Everything, and nothing.</p><p>She doesn’t stop time. She holds out the needles in her fists, the ones you thought she was going to use on you, that first time you met on the rooftop, and <em>destruction</em> erupts from them. Your maroonblood buddy is like a particle cannon battery with a foxy bod.</p><p>You steady yourself, among the remains of the atomized corpses, and grin a big grin at her. “Hey, babe. Couldn’t stay away from me, huh?”</p><p>“You have a <span>運命,</span>” she says, like always, and you laugh. You’re thinking of training - the legislacerator part of your advanced schoolfeeding, the part that wasn’t about keeping records or remembering reams of punishments for a zillion different crimes under Imperial law. The part about Legislaceration, emphasis on the ‘Lacerate.’</p><p>They told you that when you were on the bounty board’s business, you were on the Condesce’s business. That you weren’t trolls anymore. You were engines for the purposes of making corpses out of the Condesce’s enemies when their names came up on the board.</p><p><em>‘Death is your moirail now, children,’</em> they’d said.<em>‘Only she can take away your pain.’</em></p><p>You tilt your head back, and you laugh, like you haven’t laughed in sweeps. You laugh, and laugh, and laugh.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This chapter is for paraTactician.</p><p>(Read The Vienna Game, folks. Remember your history, just like Redglare.)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. three of a kind</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>
  <span class="sollux"> <span class="font-big">♊︎</span> </span>
</p><p><br/>
She starts to get wise, the longer it goes on.</p><p>Sometimes she goes a perigee or more without making an appearance, sometimes she doesn’t even come see you before a major jump, and you have to stare into the void of slipspace completely alone, steering the flagship through nonphysical space for wipes at a time, with nothing but horrorterrors for company. The vanguard fleet follows in your wake, their helmscolumns synced to your course. You deliver the insatiable hunger of Meenah (that’s her lusus-name, Meenah, she told it to you, like it <em>matters)</em> and her starving Imperial hordes to system after system, and they shove them into the Fleet’s bottomless acid tracts and render them down for parts.</p><p>(You know you can’t stop. You went with Kankri and Rosa because you knew what would happen once you were installed in a ship. The hardware changes you. Instills in you something that’s kinda like addiction and kind of like professionalism. There’s no getting out once you’re in.)</p><p>She doesn’t <em>really</em> know what’s happening, obviously. But she does start to notice something’s off. <em>You</em> don’t notice for a while, to be honest. It’s not till <em>she</em> starts acting different that you realize it.</p><p>She stays longer, but she seems to get less and less out of her ‘visits’, because she gets pissed off easier. You’ve never seen her when she’s really,<em>truly</em> angry, but you don’t have to. You’ve seen her when she’s <em>happy,</em> which is <em>much</em> worse. When you start to miss her too much, when slipspace gets too lonely and you start to wish for her huge awful hand on your cheek, you remember Kankri and Rosa and Meulin’s faces.</p><p>And then you start mixing Latula and ‘the Handmaid’’s faces in there, too, and it gets easier.</p><p>She doesn’t know what’s happening, but she can tell you don’t need her as much. It makes her pissy.</p><p>Her visits get more nerve-wracking, but also, if you’re being honest, a whole <em>fuckload</em> more fun.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>“So do you spawn shadow droppers?” you ask.</p><p><span>“いいえ,”</span> Your janky-ass kludge working knowledge of East Alternian at least knows that that means ‘no’. Which you could also have gathered with your shocking mastery over context clues, because of how many times she’s used it.</p><p>“Association of natural rhythms of above-ground diurnal species’ breeding cycles with supernatural causes,” Latula says. “Old superstition clinging to the troll psyche and persisting into modern times. Superstitions are <em>stubborn</em>-ass things.”</p><p>“Like parasites,” you nod. “Your turn.”</p><p>“Do you harvest the ghosts of the vengeful dead to destroy everything at the end of the world?” Latula asks.</p><p>
  <span>“いいえ,”</span>
</p><p>“Ghosts fade out anyway.” you growl. You’re starting to get used to how much talking hurts. “And most people don’t even hang around as ghosts, it’s only a tiny percentage of all trolls, and most of the coherent ones are strong psionics. I bet that one came out of people trying to explain why one person’s quadrant stuck around as a revenant after they got culled but someone else’s didn’t.”</p><p>“Irrationality is, as they say, grody to the <em>max.”</em></p><p>“No one says that,” the girl who’s brought the two of you together says, “except for stupid people and pan-damaged people. Either of you may be both. I am not sure yet.”</p><p>“Sticks and stones, babe,” Latula grins viciously. Her grin is <em>beautiful.</em></p><p>
  <span>“スティック俺の 石またはできる 刺す あなたのもの. わたし 嫋か. あなたの膣.”</span>
</p><p>“My turn,” you cut in. “Curse grubs with nonviable mutations?</p><p>
  <span>“いいえ,”</span>
</p><p>“As if people need excuses to make up stories about mutants.” You say, very bitterly. “I bet the propaggrandizers came up with that one.”</p><p>“Blight crops?” Latula offers.</p><p>“Occasionally.”</p><p>“Holy <em>grub</em> some <em>progress,”</em> you cry. “Do you ambush girls who get stuck outside after sunup and turn them into rainbow drinkers?”</p><p>
  <span>“いいえ,”</span>
</p><p>“Trick question. Only jades turn into drinkers and only after they’re technically dead, and it pretty much only happens when everyone plans for it.”</p><p>Latula looks interested. “What makes you say that?”</p><p>“I made a jade scream my name with the incredible properties of my mutant bulge once,” you say, which <em>is</em> true, but it makes Latula snort and turn away. ‘The Handmaid’ isn’t the only one who knows how to get rid of people by being horrible. (And you like this all-over-the-place teal chick a whole lot, she’s funny and clever and awesome - but you aren’t going to be talking to her about Rosa.)</p><p>“Still though, fucking shameful,” you mutter at ‘the Handmaid’, “Do you at <em>least</em> kick around infant lusii for fun??”</p><p>
  <span>“いいえ,”</span>
</p><p>“What the fuck,” you can’t actually move your arms to bang them on something so you just wriggle in a pissed-off manner inside your column, “That’s one out of eight. What kind of shit-tier Handmaid are you? If I was running demon school I wouldn’t even let you IN with that kind of score on your eval,”</p><p><span>“入らせて あなたの膣,”</span> she says. <span>“礼拝 私の性器 とともに の中に 貴方の 下衆野郎.”</span></p><p>Latula gives a very sexy inquisitive little smile up at you. <em>“Do</em> you think she’s really the Handmaid?”</p><p>“Does it matter??”</p><p>She frowns. “I’d say so.”</p><p>“I am the Handmaid.” she says.</p><p>Latula glances at her, but you ignore her. “Who gives an asshole, honestly? Everything about her is impossible. She’s an anomaly. She might be the entity who inspired the Handmaid myth. I don’t know and I don’t really care.”</p><p>“I am the Handmaid.”</p><p>“Yeah, and you can enjoy a big sloppy poorly-harvested 12th Perigee’s Eve pile of what it feels like to get ignored while other people are saying relevant things,” (You might have cared, once, but it’s hard to care about anything anymore.)</p><p>Latula raps her cane on the floor a few times. “Shit you,” you yell, “this isn’t a courtblock,”</p><p>She looks right back at you. “I’m calling for order nonetheless! Ram-bam here probably departs from a lot of my usual presuppositions about how trolls interact with other trolls, but <em>usually</em> people appreciate it when you talk to them directly!”</p><p>(Kankri tried that, you think. Look where it got him.)</p><p>She sits down on one of the thickest of the cables that hang from the upper reaches of your prison, like a hammock. Fronds still folded over the handle of her cane, tip resting on the floor. “You’re the Handmaid,” she says.</p><p>
  <span>“はい.”</span>
</p><p>“So, if you don’t do any of the above - no revenant making, no rainbow drinkers, no ghost-conscription - what <em>do</em> you do? Other than bother legislacerators with plenty of shit to do, thank you <em>very</em> much,”</p><p>“I cause <span>運命</span> to come to pass,” she says. She’s still just staring at the two of you, distant, statue-like. “I make things happen that must happen.”</p><p>You laugh. Your throat is raw and more yellow phlegm flies out of your mouth. “According to who,” you croak, “Is there a Department of Destiny? Is that a fucking Fleet office no one ever told me about?”</p><p>“This universe has a <span>運命</span>. You, too, are part of it. Both of you.”</p><p>“She will not plug her ignorance shaft about this destiny stuff,” Latula says. “What, has she not worn out your hear ducts with it, too?”</p><p>“Nope. Mostly it’s just been anime and saying really shitty gross things to me that I only understand <em>about</em> thirty percent of,”</p><p>“Unacceptable!” she barks, in her best snippy bureaucrat voice. “If we’re both going to be here with her, the suffering will be equally distributed.”</p><p>
  <span>“釜を掘る あなた自身 あなたとの欠如 の感謝 日本の文化, それは巨大です. 大きすぎるあなたのための 可哀想 膣.”</span>
</p><p>“I didn’t catch that one,”</p><p>“She called your nook small,” Latula says, “Which, you know.” She grins a filthy grin. “Not a lie. Or a bad quality.”</p><p>You cackle. She cackles. It’s a good-time cacklefest. </p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>
  <span class="aradia"> <span class="font-big">♈︎<br/>
<br/>
</span> </span>
</p><p><br/>
“Okay, okay, okay, so, babe,” The law-woman waves her blunt around. “You can obviously manipulate or bypass or otherwise make your <em>personal pailing assist device</em> some of the laws of space and time... so … like… “What is it all <em>about, mannn?</em> Why do you do any of it?”</p><p><em>“Way</em> more important question,” the helmsman blows out smoke from the blunt he’s holding up to his face with his psionics. “Is this <em>dank ass future weed,”</em></p><p>
  <span>“はい.”</span>
</p><p>
  <em>“Fuck yeah,”</em>
</p><p>“It <em>could</em> be dank ass <em>past</em> weed. Like, a strain that doesn’t exist anymore. Would that be cooler?”</p><p>“Why do you know things about soporifics? You’re a fuckin’ ‘lacerator,”</p><p>“Soporifics are legal as long as they aren’t on the higher-priority lists of controlled substances and as long as you pay the officially mandated kickbacks to the Empress,” she says, <em>amazingly</em> composed for someone breathing in this much Man on the Moon.</p><p>“You are not talking like yourself again.” you say. “Clearly not stoned enough. Another hit.”</p><p>“Really wish you’d stop saying that, Handjob,”</p><p>“Another hit. <span>それを私に呼ばないで または私はあなたを作ります陰茎 アーク.”</span></p><p>The Helmsman narrows his ocular cavities at you. “You don’t vape, do you,” </p><p>You fix him with your disapproval face. “You know the East Alternian word for ‘vape’, but you don’t know the one for ‘dirt’.”</p><p>
  <em>“Answer the fuckin’ question,”</em>
</p><p>
  <span>“いいえ. 私はしません.”</span>
</p><p>The law-woman exhales. (She is surprisingly good at blowing fat rings, for a novice.) “F’real, though, Time … Time … Timeshare. Quit sayin’ that, babe.”</p><p>“I only say true things.”</p><p>“Not true, grrl.”</p><p>
  <span>“くそ君は.”</span>
</p><p>“Ok. Whatevs. I’m <em>way</em> too high for that conversation.” She waves her blunt as if it’s her that has wandkind. “Stop sayin’ I’m not me.”</p><p>“When I see you in the Fleet, you are not yourself. <em>This</em> is you.” You point at the center of her chest. </p><p>“We keep doin’ this, Hotbod,” she sighs, “You keep on … sayin’ shit. That’s not true. Like if you say it enough times… it’ll be true.”</p><p>“I have no bearing on what is true. What’s true is already decided.”</p><p>“You’re doin’ it again...”</p><p>“What is this ‘destiny’ musclebeast leavings?” The helmsman says, in a tone that suggests he thinks he has the power to demand anything. “There’s no ‘destiny.’ There’s just a universe that hates us.”</p><p><span>“はい.”</span> That is <span>運命.”</span></p><p>“Bullshit,” he says, but his anger has no force to it. He is bound to the aspect of Doom, and so the true nature of the universe - that of <span>苦しみ 及び 必然的に</span> - is something that he understands, deep in his soul.</p><p>This is not true of the law-woman, of course. She is bound to Mind, and thus her existence is defined by her fixation on <span>結果,</span> on the action of choice and on its outcome. A universe in which there is no choice, truly, is one that she will never <span>平和を見つける.</span> “You don’t get to decide who I am, babe.”</p><p>“I make no decisions. You are who you are. That is your <span>運命.”</span> You have to be who we are to achieve your <span>運命.”</span></p><p>She throws the blunt at your face. You blink, a few times.</p><p>“Did you know I was gonna do that?”</p><p>
  <span>“いいえ,”</span>
</p><p>“Then what’s the point of destiny? Not everything happens for… like … a reason, grrl.”</p><p>“You are wrong. Why do you not act like yourself?”</p><p>“That <em>is</em> me … Handjob!!” She seems to take a moment to think of a terrible epithet for you and fails to come up with a new one. She throws her graspers in the air. The haze of smoke in the air twirls about the path of her fronds. “These … these ... hang-times are the shiz and all, baby, but I got <em>shit</em> to do!! Autotunes is <em>right,</em> this universe <em>is</em> a hellhole that hates us - but I am gonna fix it!! Or at least <em>move towards</em> fixing it!” She swings her cane wildly. She loses her grip on it and it goes flying across the block. The helmsman scowls at it. The law-woman stands and navigates her way to where it fell. “And I only got so long,” she snaps, climbing through the hanging cables and devices that support the helmscolumn, “I’m not some purple or seatroll, I ain’t got the Empress personally feedin’ me extra lives like <em>some</em> peeps around here - so I gotta climb the chain <em>fast!!</em> I gotta be <em>better</em> than me. Better than anyone,” she trips over a floor-vein and bangs her horns on the floor. “Fuck-”<br/>
<br/>
You feel the trembling in the air as the helmsman picks her up with his psionics. He is, perhaps, a bit less precise than usual, and she sways back to a sitting position atop the tubing. “I gotta be … the <em>perfect legislacerator,”</em> she mumbles. “The perfect teal.”</p><p>(She is right, of course, and this is her fate, even if she will not live to realize much of it. All Alternia exists for the sole purpose of bringing into existence twenty-four singular trolls. She, and the one in which her genes will reoccur in hundreds of sweeps, are two of them. In every way that matters, she is the Perfect Tealblooded Troll.)</p><p>“Well, then, you’re fucked,” the helmsman says.</p><p>“...what?” she raises her head. She looks heartbroken.</p><p>“No way that’s ever gonna happen,” he grouses. “You’re <em>way</em> too cool to ever go <em>anywhere</em> in the ‘Lacerature.”</p><p>She looks at him, and then laughs, sinking down next to the column, cane across her knees, resting her nugbone against his leg.</p><p>That <span>不可知</span> feeling collects in your thorax again, as you look at the two of them.</p><p>“Yeah, maybe I gotta put on a mask for the Admiralty.” The law-woman looks at you, her wide toothy grin a little haphazard from the soporweed - but her expression fierce, nonetheless, “I gotta … do myself up, like a ... hemoist, party line, d-bag, to. You know. Get in with the hemoist party-line, d-bags. And it … sucks, babe. I get so fuckin… tired of it. Sometimes.”</p><p>She takes a deep breath. “...but it’s my choice to do it. So that … perfect-ass Central Casting ‘lacerator? You meet outside in the real world?</p><p>That’s me, too, Curliecue.” She jabs a stalk at you, “Accept it. Live it. ‘cause <em>that’s what’s up.”</em></p><p>She smiles at you, beaten and exhausted, but shameless, and the helmsman observes you from his prison, haughty and grim but smirking through his misshapen, jagged fangs.</p><p>Maybe it’s the weed that gives you the revelation. You realize, suddenly, why you’re so fascinated with these two.</p><p>They are the first trolls you have met in sweeps who are <span>あなたを恐れない.</span></p><p>You ask them why.</p><p>The law-woman scoffs, and gazes up at the ceiling. “You don’t scare me, dogg. The shit I’ve been through?” She retrieves her blunt and takes another long drag. “Uncannybrutal hand-to-hand throwdowns with wanted criminals in the underdecks of Imperial ships? Where one wrong move means an edged weapon between my thoracic struts? Highbloods who could have me culled if I put even one stalk out of line? Getting suppressed into the dirt by whack-ass xenotech weapons, gettin’ impromptu mudbaths from how deep I gotta dig to not get reamed? Dogfighting above planetary battlefields, on Pyralspite, aerocraft comin’ at us, gettin’ shots right between my horns…”</p><p>She looks back at you. “The kind of stuff I was doing when we met. The kind of stuff that makes us both <em>sisters to death.</em></p><p>And that’s not even the stuff that keeps me up in ‘coon, it’s the <em>paperwork</em> that I’m never gonna really be able to live with myself over, the stuff they make me do, a million trolls’ lives a night as lines on spreadsheets…</p><p>...and knowin’ I just gotta keep doin’ it over and over again, more than I can ever really handle, and hope I’m where I gotta be by the time I burn myself out…</p><p>...nah. Y’don’t scare me.”</p><p>The helmsman snorts. “What the fuck could you do to me that’s worse than the outpouring of gamegrub waste effluvia the universe has already dumped on me? How could you possibly hurt me more than I’ve already been hurt? <em> Fuck </em> you, ‘Handmaid.’ If you’re really Death, just kill me. Get it over with. Do me the only favor that matters.”</p><p>“I can’t,” you say. “This is not your time. You have a <span>運命.”</span> (And if he were dead, before his time, you would not see him in the future, and nothing is worth that.)</p><p>“God, shut the fuck up,” he’s sneering, “I’m <em>already</em> sick of hearing about ‘destiny,’ take your ‘destiny’ and go sit on a bag of bulges. Do you actually give a shit about <em>anything?</em> You keep coming to see us, do you even <em>like</em> us? Or are you just doing this because you think you have to. Because that’s what’s written in the Big Bullshit Book Of Destiny or whatever it is?” He snarls at you. “Fuck. Is <em>that</em> why you brought us together? To fulfill some kind of ‘destiny’? Is me meeting Latula part of your <em>deterministic oral autoerogenous shameglobe stimulation fest,</em> you dickshitting <em>gallsphincter,”</em></p><p><span>“...いいえ,”</span> you say, because, to them, you only say true things.</p><p>“Then <em>why,”</em></p><p>You do not know how to answer him.</p><p>“Get the fuck out of my helmsblock. <em>Get out.”</em></p><p>He cannot make you leave.</p><p>But you do.<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>You go to his future, instead. Maybe at this point in the timeline it’s been so long that he doesn’t remember his anger anymore.</p><p>He acknowledges you as you arrive, this time. He shifts a bit inside the column. It looks very different. The flesh is darker. The fluid in the vein is a different shade. There are fewer hanging cables and more cybernetic components. Your liberator’s helmsblock has been upgraded, over the sweeps. He nods to you. “Bad night, huh.”</p><p>You have no response. He makes a derisive noise. “Don’t bother. I can tell. I know two people in the universe, Hands. I <em>better</em> know you. Also you are super stoned.”</p><p>You kneel beside his column, and you each let your psychic presences enfold one another. There is an <span>親密</span> to this beyond what any crude physical touch could provide. You know you are not missing anything. You can feel each and every detail of each other’s bodies. You have a perfect mental picture of him, derived from the <span>心的 達成できない</span> level of precision with which you can map his form with your psionics. His physical existence is filed away in your mind and memorized. <span>あなたは彼を覚えています の瞬間まで あなたの死.</span> You know that he is the same.</p><p><span>“理由はわかりませんこれは許可されています,”</span> you say. (He understands you perfectly well by now.) <span>“なぜ私は許可されていますあなたに会い続ける.”</span></p><p>He snorts. “Must not screw anything up. If what you tell me’s true, probably you’re even <em>supposed</em> to be here.” His mind strokes down your head, between your horns. Some small amount of tension flows out of you.</p><p>You look up at him, and you realize that, to your ganderbulbs, he looks like a pillar.</p><p>Your vision is blurry. “Hands?” he moves again inside the column. Your face feels like it’s burning, trails of molten rock running down it. “Hands, what  - what the <em>fuck?</em> Are you <em>crying?”</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I love how this chapter goes from demonstrating Mituna and Latula's compatible personalities - both of them intellectual, and full of information, and marrying that to boisterous personalities, but in subtly different ways, Latula more of a scholar and a big-picture thinker, Mituna more in a practical, technologically-minded way, more of a skeptic, maybe contemplating what their relationship might have been in the Beforan universe, before everything went so wrong - right to Dank Ass Future Weed and Mituna's Zero Tolerance Vaping Policy. I also like Latula's Tannhauser Gate Speech here.</p><p>(Kankri/Signless <i>absolutely</i> vaped.)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. apocrypha</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><br/>
<br/>
<span class="terezi"><span class="font-big">♎︎</span></span><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>She’s never done this before. Never left the two of you alone together, here. From what your sniffer can tell, the pocket of time hasn’t popped. No drones or royal security guards gonna bust in on you and make a Troll Jackson Pollock painting all over the wall with your insides.</p><p>You take a few more pulls. So does he. Then he sets his blunt down, his TK letting it drift down to the floor and then depositing it into a waste disposal artery.</p><p>“Think she’ll come back?” you ask. You’ve stopped smoking. You lay your tabard and overgarments out over the pulsing, veiny meat of the helmscolumn, so you can just nestle into it and rest your nug and shoulder against him without it being <em> too </em> gross.</p><p>“Don’t know, don’t care.”</p><p>“Don’t you?”</p><p>“Eh.” He can’t actually shrug, but he manages about a quarter of a shrug. “Wouldn’t mind just staying like this for most of forever. No navigating. No participating in Imperial conquest. You’re here.”</p><p>“I’m flattered.” You truly are. “But I have things to do.”</p><p>He makes a nasty noise you really don’t want to hear from him, because he’s the closest thing you’ve ever encountered to a moral authority, and also because you think you’re red for him. “What,” he sneers, “to change the Empire? Fix the galaxy?”</p><p>“To try, at least.”</p><p>“Someone as smart as you shouldn’t waste your life on pointless garbage. You’re teal, you got some time in you.”</p><p>Cracks spread across the surface of your heart. “You don’t really believe that, do you? <em> You </em> tried.”</p><p>He reorients his head to look down at you, giving you a dirty eye. “I <em> do </em> know who you are,” you tell him. You might be intimidated by him, as you are by essentially no one and nothing else, if you weren’t fuzzy in the pan from the weed.</p><p>“Then you know we failed,” he says, after a time. “Without ever doing anything.” He turns his gaze twofold away from you.<br/>
<br/>
“That’s not true, man… we keep what you did alive. What you believed.”</p><p><em> “He </em> believed it.”</p><p>Those hairline fractures in your chest grow a couple more branches. “...what about you?”</p><p>He grunts. He hangs so heavy in the column’s restraining growth. “...I believed in <em> him.” </em></p><p>“What was he… like?”</p><p>He doesn’t answer.</p><p>“Please,” you say. The pot makes you bold but lets the desperation in your voice show, too. “No primary sources remain to us. We have his words, but they were written by his Disciple, in blueblood ink.”</p><p>You aren’t expecting him to laugh. And not just laugh, he <em> guffaws, </em> he L O Ls, drool and snot get all over the floor in front of him. “Is it that fucking funny?” You say, nastily, “Is my - my <em> hope </em> so funny that you’re gonna blow a … fuckin … fuse on your squawkbox over it?”</p><p>“Shit me, Latula, no, it’s, it’s not that,” he hacks out another glob of yellow phlegm. It smells like his own essence mixed with rattling chains and shock collars. Must have some chemicals from the column mixed into it. “I just, fuck, holy dicks, that book of Meulin’s actually got <em> published, </em> and you fuckers are <em> reading it,” </em></p><p>You have <em> no </em> idea how to handle this, probably wouldn’t even if you had a clear thinksponge, so you just grab one striking detail and yank on it.</p><p>“Meulin?”</p><p>He coughs a few more times. “Fuckin’ <em> shit, </em> I am not built to laugh that hard anymore, oh gog, yeah. Yeah.”</p><p>“...that was his Disciple’s name.”</p><p>“...yeah.” He sighs. The motion makes his arms strain just a bit at his bonds. <em> “She </em> believed. Mother <em> Grub, </em> did she fucking believe. God she wrote and wrote and wrote, she never fuckin’ stopped writing, it wasn’t even his <em> idea,” </em> he groans, “She just started taking notes one day - after we taught her to write, by the way, she was fucking <em> feral, </em> she must have had writing backed up all the way in her nook and once we got it started it just <em> gushed </em> - and he was like ‘hm, you know what, maybe it would be sort of a good goddamn idea if <em> anyone ever </em> could <em> read any of this important shit I’ve said without having to meet me in person at one of my insanely fucking dangerous sermons that you get culled instantly if you’re caught at’,” </em></p><p>He shakes his head. “For the smartest troll in the world <em> god </em> he was an idiot.”</p><p>You stand up. Sit down in front of him. Get a little shaky and then just lay down, cranium resting on your hands, so you can look up at him.</p><p>“What was he like? Really?”</p><p>You don’t think he’s going to answer. You think you shot too high again. Somehow that possibility this time seems worse than before, where having made the wrong bet meant dying.</p><p>“...he was the scrawniest fuckin’ loser nerd on Alternia,”</p><p>You hike your eyebrows at the ceiling.</p><p>“Seriously, he talked like the chillest bureaucrat public relations officer you <em> ever </em> met. Like he took <em> drama schoolfeeding. </em> ‘Projection, projection, projection, it’s all about projection, and communicating clearly,’ holy <em> TITS </em> if I never heard the word PROJECTION again I could die a happy fucking troll,</p><p>“But when he talked, people listened. Some people anyway. And don’t you or anybody out there fucking think for a piss-marchbug <em> microsweep </em> that he just came up with that on the spot like some kind of <em> virtuoso, </em> he walked around every hideout we ever had in circles <em> all day </em> rehearsing that shit with Meulin, while some people were trying to <em> sleep, </em>”</p><p>His voice always sounds like it’s in pain. But it’s different, somehow, here. It doesn’t smell like he’s forcing it to come out. It smells more like he’s evacuating, like his body is getting something out of it that has to come out or it’ll fester in his acid tracts and slowly kill him. That cathartic kind of upchuck that makes you feel better afterwards.</p><p>“But the thing that <em> always </em> happened, that basically everyone who ever met him had to go through, it was like hazing or something. You’d hear him talk, and he was inspiring and everything but he was a nerd, he made a real good case but it was like, yeah, okay, try talking like this to a ‘lacerator and see where it gets you - no offense, babe,”</p><p>“None taken, babe,” (It does hurt, a little, but it’s not anything he did.)</p><p>“-and then something would happen - and it could be anything, it could be him seeing someone with an injury, or someone telling a story, or someone being afraid - or, someone saying something hemoist by accident, that might actually have been what got him the worst - he would <em> blow. His Top. </em></p><p>He would fucking <em> go off. </em> I don’t know where he <em> learned </em> any of the fuckwords he used to sling out. He was like a fucking blitz rifle. Fire rate too high to be fully tracked by the unaugmented troll glancenugget.”</p><p>“Between two thousand and twenty-two hundred expletives per minute?” you grin at him.</p><p>“At <em> minimum,” </em> </p><p>You both laugh. “That makes sense,” you say. “With his final sermon.”</p><p>“His what now?”</p><p>“The moment of his death. The Vast Expletive, bro.”</p><p>“Oh my <em> Gog.” </em> He makes a sound like he just pulled a muscle. <em> “That’s what you call it.” </em></p><p>“That’s what it says in his Disciple’s book, man…”</p><p>He snorts again. “Yeah. No. That sounds <em> exactly </em> right,”</p><p>Then he stops and glares at you. “Wait. Is that the exact number.”</p><p>“Number?”</p><p>“Twenty-two hundred. For the fucking blitz rifle.”</p><p>“Exact <em> maximum </em> ROF for a standard-pattern olive-issue blitz rifle, dude, at fully automatic,” you clarify. “Average ROF is approximately eighteen hundred and fifty, more often. Obviously, in practical combat terms the number of rounds sent downrange each minute is more like three hundred. Man.”</p><p>“So, what, you swallowed the blitz rifle manual?”</p><p>“I have swallowed all <em> kinds </em> of manuals, babe,” you waggle your eyebrows.</p><p>He breathes out a long, weary respiratory evacuation. “...you sound like him.”</p><p>The state of your pan at the moment doesn’t really absorb this.</p><p>“Like who?”</p><p>“...like Kankri.”</p><p>Your bulbs bug out of your face a little. You sit way up. “Was that his name? The Sufferer’s name?”</p><p>“...yeah.</p><p>He was so angry,” he says, hollow. <em> “So fucking angry, all </em> the time. He hated the world, so <em> fucking </em> much. And sometimes, he let it out. And it got people, every time. Nobody ever thought that skinny little off-spectrum <em> nerdulon </em> could have that much fire in his bellowsac cavity. But shit. Him being angry was more powerful than every Ψ of energy in my ridiculous swelled-up mutant thinkpan.”</p><p>He sags, and the animus goes out of him, like a computer powering down. “Which, is why they had to kill him, obviously. The Empire isn’t stupid.”</p><p>You think of your office, full of computers and piles and piles of hard copies. Of the thirty-one other offices just like it on your one ship alone, and the fifteen or so maroon and yellow staff under every teal in every one of those offices. The clusters of datalines that feed you information from above, from cerulean intelligence department and the Legislacerature office on the decks above you, and the ones that lead down, to the <em> scads </em> of apiculture processors in the hardened combvaults under the teal compartments. Endlessly processing, tabulating, analyzing. Thinking. One node of the vast, distributed network of neurons that added all together make up the living brain of the Alternian Empire. One node among twenty in your assigned fleet alone. One fleet among dozens. An Empire of thought-organs, all turned to the purpose of finding, and uncovering, and subjugating its enemies.</p><p>That’s what Mituna and the Signless had been up against.</p><p>What <em> you're </em> up against.</p><p>  “...no,” you say. “No, it’s not. It’s got me working for it. And a lotta people like me.”</p><p>
  <span>“あなたみたいな人は誰もいない.”</span>
</p><p>You almost flip out. Mituna twists in the helmscolumn. “Sunslamming FUCK, Hands, don’t DO that! Tula, clamp your frond over my chest and feel my pump about to explode, I can’t do it myself,”</p><p>You smile at him, your own feeling like it’s filled to overflowing with fondness, with redness. You do reach up and place your palm over where his pusher is, below his suit and his exolayer and his thoracic struts. “Sounds like a blitz rifle,” you say. “On max ROF.”</p><p>“Yeah, see? Can’t sustain that for more than like a second. You’re gonna feel real fuckin’ stupid when you scare me so bad my biscuit <em> explodes out of my torso </em> and you’re down one vital destiny component,”</p><p>“I would never hurt you,” she says.</p><p>“Of course not, because destiny, or whoever, says you can’t. I bet you’re working off some fuckin-”</p><p>“I told you,” she says, “<span>天命</span> requires us to be who we are. And I would never hurt you.”</p><p>“Yeah, because-”</p><p><em><span>“いいえ,”</span></em> she says, “because I would never hurt you.”</p><p>You take Mituna’s hand. The smell of suffering around them both is still there … but in this moment, there’s a lot less of it.</p><p>“So, Hotbaad,” you say, “You’ve been all over history, apparently. You know anything about the Signless?”</p><p>She shrugs. “I have heard his words. And read the recording of them.”</p><p>You raise an eyebrow. “You read his Disciple’s book?”</p><p>She nods.</p><p>“Why?” Mituna grunts. “If you know the future, or whatever, you knew nothing he did would matter, right?”</p><p>“He was fated to die,” she says, nonchalantly, “But what he did matters <em> very </em> much. His actions resound throughout history, and form one part of this universe’s ... <span>究極の 天命.</span> His Disciple’s book is an object of immeasurable value to history. To <span>天命.</span> Of course I have read it.”</p><p>“...what’s it say?” Mituna’s voice is uncharacteristically quiet.</p><p>She shrugs again, and decaptchalogues a tome. “This is my copy. You can read it if you wish.”</p><p>His gaper falls open. You kick your own ass inside your head as hard as possible for never bringing him <em> your </em> copy. There’s probably no safer situation in the whole Empire in which to read it.</p><p>The expression on his face doesn’t really change much, overall. But yellow gathers at the corners of his eyes as he holds it up to his face with his telekinesis. The smell of suffering fills the block, almost enough to choke you (in a metaphysical sorta way), but this time it’s sickly sweet, aching melancholy mixed in with pain, like sugar aged so much it’s overfermented and turned rotten.</p><p>He shutters his lids, hiding his handsome red-and-blue ganders - one red like the Sufferer’s blood, one right in between the two blues - and floats the book back to Handy.</p><p>“Nah,” he says. His throat just barely croaks it out. “I don’t need it. It got out there. That’s enough. Just…”</p><p>He holds up his head. “Can you tell me what happened to them? I know he’s dead - they -” his voice gives out for a moment - “they made us watch… but what happened to the others?”</p><p>“...I’ve followed the records as far back as I can,” you tell him. “His disciple disappears. Evaporates, more like. You … well. Yeah. And the Dolorosa - his guardian,”</p><p>You actually have to take a step back, the stench of suffering gets so thick. “...she - she…”</p><p>“She became a slave,” Hands cuts in. “She suffered for many sweeps, but died a free troll.”</p><p>You both stare at her. “The Signless’s Disciple escaped after her lover was killed, and with the help of an expatriate, she wrote down his words, and then died at the end of her natural span.”</p><p>He hangs there, ancient beyond his sweeps - anyone’s sweeps, you suspect, there are a thousand-and-a-half-sweep old violets who haven’t seen as much or hurt as much as this boy - and for a sec you could almost mistake him for dead, after all.</p><p>“Leave me alone, will you?” he finally asks, so quiet you can barely hear.</p><p>You get up, and walk over to Curliecue.</p><p>“And Latula,” he rasps, “Don’t ask me about this again. Please.”</p><p>You don’t actually know if you can keep this promise, but you make it to him anyway.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. even in death</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span class="aradia"><br/>
<span class="font-big">♈︎<br/>
</span> </span>
</p><p><br/>
You know how the story ends.</p><p>You know what happens to them both, and then what happens to you.</p><p>But you understand, now, what your jailor meant, when he spoke to who you eventually learn was the <span>海賊’s</span> descendant. That the source of his power, in a way, the foundation of his omniscience, is the things he does <em> not </em> know.</p><p>You had no idea that you would ever meet them. It was written in no prophecy. It is not essential. It closes no loop, fulfills no paradox. It means nothing.</p><p>But it is essential to you. Both their company, in and of itself, and the knowledge that your existence contains within it things you cannot foresee, things that do not add to your suffering.</p><p>Your path is long. Your life, immortal, stretching through all of this universe’s history, in mockery of all others of your blood. All the time in the world, the thing all rustbloods dream of, but every minute of it, you are a slave.</p><p>But when you are with them, one or the other, or the three of you together, in the timelocked solitude of the helmsblock, the chains loosen their grip on your limbs, for just a bit. You keep the law-woman alive, stop her from breaking - and you do it to ensure that she will arrive at her fate, but you do it also because you do not think you could do otherwise. You visit the helmsman, through both of your eternal lifespans, and together, your suffering is just a bit lessened, distributed across both your shoulders. She laughs, too loudly, and gives you terrible name after terrible name, and you hurl East Alternian obscenities at her for it, and you hope that she never stops. He complains, endlessly, and lists both your faults in exacting detail, and though you are doomed to be who you are, as all beings are, you listen, and he is rarely wrong. The law-woman loves him, with a devotion no less great than yours to your terrible master, but it is a devotion of her choosing, and it cannot take away all of his pain, but it is pure.</p><p>Their love gives you something you have never had, and often, you wish that you could return it to them, that you could accept them into your body, into your nook and between your lips - but you can never bring yourself to it - and they allow you that. </p><p>You have never been afforded such respect.</p><p>Without them, you are unsure if you would have had the strength to make it to the end of your road. To the moment you find the same blessed release the Signless’s mother found. The Knight, and the Heir, who will, one day, beget the Seer and the Mage. Your pale, and your red and your black, and sometimes, when the weight of “<span>天命</span> becomes too much, sometimes even your ash.</p><p>Your friends, such that you can have friends. Your companion in eternal pain. Your sister in the service of death.</p><p>Your pillars of shadow.</p><p>Your path is long. You do not choose its beginning or its end. And you cannot change theirs. You cannot make their ends any less inevitable. But the universe and all its history, all its time, are your garden, you are both the water and the current that pushes it. There is no need for your path to be linear in its inevitability.</p><p>The law-woman’s life is short before her time. But she has many sweeps to her still, more than many in your liberator’s empire receive, and within those moments there are all the moments you need in which to visit her. The time before her end can always be your after, and even after time has seen her destroyed? You are still there, in her past, in your present.</p><p>Her end is predestined, but in you? In your experiences? <em>She is immortal.</em></p><p>Both of them are. Latula Pyrope, and Mituna Captor.</p><p>For she is the Knight, and he is the Heir, but you are the Witch of Time, and Time has both all the power in the world over you, and no power at all.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Well. I have to thank you for this one. This one goes on the long, wonderful list of prompts I've gotten that directed me to write things I would never have even <i>considered</i> writing under my own power, but that I end up really liking and being super proud of. And I swear to god, the <i>second</i> I started writing, from the very first fucking <i>line,</i> I fell in love with these three <i>instantaneously.</i></p><p>And I got it written <i>relatively</i> smoothly, a few days ahead of deadline, and it never felt like pulling teeth! This thing is a good omen for me, creatively and headspace-wise I hope. So thank you for the opportunity to learn that, too. I <i>almost</i> did one of your other prompts, which is much more in my usual wheelhouse, but I honest to god wasn't sure how to write it, because a friend and I have a long-running private RP that's essentially <i>exactly</i> the same premise - so I couldn't think of a way to <i>write it</i> that wouldn't have just felt like copy-and-pasting from that chat! I'm glad it went this way, though, and I really hope you enjoy this. I really enjoyed writing it.</p><p>Thanks also to @laurasaurus and KABN61 for betaing and editing, and to Mel for opening my eyes to the Rad potential of Latula as a character.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>